Assessment – what are inspectors looking at?
Sean Harford, HMI, National Director, Education, puts assessment into perspective.
Sean Harford, National Director, Education
Sean Harford became National Director, Education in September 2015. Sean was appointed Her Majesty’s Inspector in 2003. Since joining Ofsted he has worked in school improvement, school inspection policy and organisational restructuring. His previous post in Ofsted was Regional Director (South).
Before joining Ofsted, Sean was a teacher and a successful senior leader in a secondary school in the East of England, as well as associate adviser for a local authority.
Follow Sean on Twitter @HarfordSean
Changes to the school inspection window
...preparing for next term’s inspections and finalising a small number of updates to our section 8 and section 5 inspection handbooks, which were published today. These updates bring some changes...
What’s an inspection judgement based upon?
...asking for documents and information in a way that the handbook says we don’t need. I want to stress that the vast majority of our inspections run smoothly and without...
Ofsted’s new arrangements for short inspections
Posted by:
Sean Harford, National Director, Education, Posted on:
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Categories:
common inspection framework, inspection, schools
From January 2018, we will convert a short inspection to a section 5 inspection (normally within 48 hours) if there are serious concerns about safeguarding, behaviour or the quality of education.
Ofsted’s findings about the school curriculum
Posted by:
Sean Harford, National Director, Education, Posted on:
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Categories:
curriculum, inspection, research and evaluation, schools
Sean Harford, National Director, Education, on Ofsted's research programme about the school curriculum and the preliminary findings so far.
Tackling workload together – a new question for staff at the point of inspection
...short films about Ofsted myths. The research indicated that more senior leaders than classroom teachers had used each of the methods listed in the survey. Nearly two-fifths (39%) had taken...
Summer round-up
...we will look at whether we need to consider curriculum more during inspection; this will feed into the new inspection framework we are developing for September 2019. Our initial survey...
Progress, but a lot of work still to do
...recent inspection was ‘a fair and accurate assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of my school’. Our research with teachers complements work we do with parents, again to understand their...
Changing our approach to short inspections: your views wanted
...as high-stakes as a full inspection. Indeed, almost 80% of respondents to a survey last year told us they were a welcome and positive change. So we are very keen...
Clarifying primary prior attainment bandings
Posted by:
Sean Harford, National Director, Education, Posted on:
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Categories:
inspection, RAISEonline, schools
It has come to my attention recently that there is some misunderstanding around the differences in the prior attainment bandings used in the Inspection dashboard, RAISEonline and FFT data for key stage 2 (KS2). This was highlighted in Jamie Pembroke’s …